UBISOFT Singapore, the Singapore branch of French games publisher Ubisoft, made the headlines in May this year when the adventure video game Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands was released.
This was because its 50-strong team had created over one-third of the game. It marked the closest a Singapore-based studio has ever come to launching a triple-A bestseller.
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Ubisoft Singapore is just one among a slew of Singapore-based games developers that have recently made news. And it is not just the big boys who have arrived. Startups like Protege Production and Ratloop Asia have also made their presence felt in the international arena of late.
Going Places
Two-year-old Protege’s Armor Valley, a third-person shooter and real-time strategy game in 3D, won the Excellence in Audio award at the Independent Games Festival (IGF) Shanghai last year. Another achievement, which it is proudest of, is being named as one of the top five startups at the Game Connection America conference in March this year, beating entrants from 25
other countries.
For Protege’s Managing Director Janelle Lee, these achievements offered a vindication of sorts. She said: “People said I won’t make it because 3D is difficult. They don’t believe that a Singapore game can make it. But I rate our standard as international and don’t want to lock myself to the old way of doing things, such as 2D.”
Ratloop Asia’s Rocketbirds: Revolution, a browser-based action game, was nominated for visual art, audio and the Seumas McNally Grand Prize at IGF this year. Ratloop Asia’s founder Tan Sian Yue is looking to take the game, which is already for sale online, onto the major game consoles. The company has already received console development kits – no easy feat for an independent studio in the region.
Nurturing Talents
Mr Thomas Lim, Director, Interactive Media and Games, Media Development Authority of Singapore (MDA), believes that much of the traction gained by Singapore’s games industry could be attributed to MDA’s talent development strategy.
He said: “By putting in place policies and enabling infrastructure that make Singapore an attractive place where top MNCs set up business, we have effectively been bringing in top industry talent from all around the world, who have in turn trained and boosted the capabilities of local talents who work with them.
“The reverse is also true. Our active involvement with international talent development programmes, such as the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab, has begun to bear fruit, giving our local talents valuable exposure to the cream of the crop in interactive media and games R&D.”
The Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab is a research collaboration between the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Interactive Digital Media R&D Programme Office hosted by MDA. One of its recent commercial successes was CarneyVale: Showtime, which has a distribution deal with Microsoft’s Games for Windows Live on the PC platform.
Co-Investment and Funding
Talent development aside, MDA has been also quick to spot and invest in new games technologies and support content with commercialisation potential.
Protege has the MDA-Microsoft XNA Development Initiative to thank. The initiative supports budding developers by funding winning games and launching them on Microsoft’s Xbox LIVE Community Games, which is popular with gamers worldwide.
Ms Lee said: “Without this initiative, I wouldn’t even have thought of producing my game for the Xbox platform.”
In Ratloop Asia’s case, MDA recognised the potential of Rocketbirds: Revolution, and supported it with a grant under the Digital Content Development Scheme, which Mr Tan used to offset developmental costs and hire an artist.
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